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Beguiling rural pleasures await in Connecticut
This seemingly compact area has developed country living into a high art
 | At Whippoorwill Farm in Lakeville, Conn., you can buy local grass-fed beef and watch the owners' dog play soccer. Preserving farmland and fighting sprawl are big causes here. |
Tara Donne / Conde Nast Traveler |
What follows is an adaptation of a story originally appearing in the March 2008 issue of Condé Nast Traveler.
The northwestern corner of Connecticut has, over recent years, developed country living into a high art: simple beauty, sophisticated creature comforts, lack of pretension, fertile land. This is not to say that, should you be willing to let yourself go, you couldn't go broke exploring the possibilities for conspicuous indulgence, from ballooning to grass-fed beef. But the ultimate seduction is in the landscape itself — views over the high hills into New York State, and across the gentle rolling green meadows dotted with sturdy black steer.
Litchfield County is both rural and bourgeois, and its attendant pleasures are a mix of high and low: Millionaires' Row just north of Sharon and manure on your boots; mosquitoes, poison ivy, and blackberries in the backyard as well as handmade Belgian chocolates; working-class Torrington and twee Litchfield; well-chosen antiques and the junk shops just outside town; over-the-top inns and everyday farms.
By car, this corner of the world seems relatively compact; it takes no longer than a half hour to get from one town to the next. The roads, even the main highways that make a triangle through the area, generally have only two lanes, and they follow the contours of the land rather than the convenience of commuters. Not more than two hours from New York City, where I live, Litchfield County is an easy place to spend a weekend or a month at any time of year.
Northwest Connecticut, bucolic with hill and dale, farm and mansion, is like a fairy tale, with squires and horses, fields of corn and perhaps wheat, cream and fresh eggs — a tactile connection to the land experienced by gentleman and farmer. It's a barely remembered world that suggests safety, peace, and quiet, a place and time of nursery rhymes where you wouldn't be surprised to see kings picking cabbages.
If you come into West Cornwall from the west, you must drive across the Housatonic River through a little red covered bridge, which dates from 1864. What makes this country village so perfect is that, in addition to its beauty, it has some of the trappings of big city life, only miniaturized. Old train tracks run through the middle of town, and in the old railroad station is a thrift shop.
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Litchfield County's biggest city is Torrington, at its eastern edge. Incorporated in 1740, it grew into the area's industrial center, with the largest collection of Art Deco buildings in the state. By the turn of the twentieth century, Torrington's brass mills and metal factories provided work for a surge of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, whose cultural influence can be tasted in the sausages and grinders at Carbone's and in the pastas and meat dishes at Marino's or the Venetian.
Still largely blue-collar, the city launched a thirty-million-dollar redevelopment in 2006 to revitalize the downtown; the restoration of the 1931 Warner Theatre as a performing arts center was finished in 2002. The city's eastern outskirts have been sacrificed to commercial sprawl.
There, just south of the Walmart, on a tidy street of otherwise unremarkable houses, is the eighteenth-century brick home of potter Reggie Delarm. In the back of her garden is the studio where she works and teaches, a little barn jam-packed with pottery, remnants of clay, tools, and clay dust. I spent an afternoon with her, learning how to make boxes out of slabs of clay.
As I struggled to make a box that looked like something you would want to keep, Reggie worked, effortlessly, at making them too, stopping occasionally to help straighten out one of my sagging slabs. Commercial paint-a-pot studios, where you glaze some prefab ceramic object on a rainy day, have proliferated of late — but the boxes I made at Reggie's were of a different order. Most obviously, they testified to my lack of skill, but in their unevenness and floppiness, they showed just how far I would have to go to do this well. I bought myself one of Reggie's big yellow mixing bowls as consolation.
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